How To Brainstorm Properly

Brainstorming is one of the most over-used words in business today, maybe even most over-used in all organizations. Any time people are trying to come up with ideas, they call it brainstorming. And as a result, the techniques, rules, and methods of brainstorming are twisted and abused to where everyone seems to hate brainstorming and no one seems to be doing it right.

So let’s go all the way back to where it began and examine what brainstorming is and isn’t.

It’s hard to think of a ubiquitous term like “brainstorming” having an inventor, but it does. There was a creator of brainstorming. His name was Alex Osborn. Osborn wrote arguably the first book on creativity at work ever, Applied Imagination. Inside the book, he laid out a system for generating ideas in groups, to maximize the number of ideas you generate. Alex also set out four rules — the four rules of brainstorming — that a lot of people remember, but a lot of people get wrong.

Those four rules were:

1. Go for quantity over quality, because we know the best way to get good ideas is to just start with lots of ideas.

2. Withhold criticism, also said as “no idea is a bad idea.”

3. Encourage wild ideas; just freewheel and go crazy? (Sort of the point of rule two.)